This week, we decided to do the main article as a double shot. The topic is very near and dear to our hearts: our moms! We were both lucky enough to grow up with intelligent, courageous, and caring moms. In addition, both Maria and Julie hold degrees in and work in the sciences. Yup, that's right, we got it from our mamas! We hope you enjoy. -M&H

Maria NortonProfessor, Utah State University

Julie SperryCCO, Rapid Micro Biosystems

Julie Sperry by Heidi Norton

Megan and I both like to brag about our mamas. A lot. So when Megan’s mom, Julie, was in Philadelphia for a quick business trip, we jumped at the chance to interview her for our blog. And now I get to brag about Megan’s mama. We take Julie out to dinner to one of our favorite barbeque places near campus (ok, she took us out – she wouldn’t let us pay the bill). I’m excited to ask her a whole slew of questions about how she got to where she is today – Chief Commercial Officer for Rapid Micro Biosystems, which is a VC-backed company currently in its growth phase. She is helping them develop and market their product, which is a system that monitors microbial content within pharmaceutical production process from raw materials to finished product ready for injection into a patient. “We had the first generation product”, she explains. “I was brought in to say, ‘is that first generation product right for the market? If it is, then grow the heck out of it. And if it’s not, then tell us what the next generation product should be.’” Key opinion leaders have endorsed the system and her team has helped support early customers during their validation and regulatory approval process. “I’ve had a hand in defining, bringing to market and selling this new product, as well as growing the commercial, quality and manufacturing teams.” This certainly isn’t the first high-powered, awesome job she’s had -- over the last twenty years she’s had some sweet titles, all at scientific companies: Vice President Corporate Marketing and Vice President Strategic Marketing at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Vice President Global Sales at Millipore…. the list continues. She has certainly made her way in the space between business and science. Megan asks her mom when she first became interested in science right as our drinks arrive. Julie tells us that it was Nancy Drew books (problem solving with an element of forensics, although she didn’t really know the name for it at the time) and space exploration that got her hooked. “[I wanted to be] an astronaut or some kind of space explorer. That was a whole era while I was growing up. And there were no women in that field, but I always thought that would be so cool, not thinking about the dangers at the time. That’s when I started really getting interested in science.” She tells me that she loved the TV show “Lost in Space”, too. “We would go out and play it every night on the swing set, my brother (was John Robinson – the Dad) and sister (was Judy the older sister (with blond hair)) and me (I was Penny the younger sister (with brown hair)). Needless to say we had active imaginations.”

All 84 episodes are available on Hulu!

She went to a progressive middle school that let 11-year-olds do dissections, which she thought was awesome. “But then when I got to high school”, Julie said, “I became more interested in chemistry, because I realized there wasn’t as much I could do with biology. I’m aging myself, but this was before molecular biology really took off, and so biologists were mostly on the naturalist side; marine biology or environmental biology. Field heavy. And that wasn’t too interesting to me, really. But with chemistry, there was more to it. I felt, at that point in time, that there were more ways that I could apply it and that there were more jobs. It is very interesting how the roles have shifted now; I think there are a lot more jobs for molecular biologists and bioengineers than there are for chemists [today].” In college, she decided to major in chemistry with the intent of applying to medical school and becoming a doctor. While her parents were supportive of whatever career choice she wanted to make, her academic advisor gave her what she calls the worst advice of her life. Her advisor was a chemistry professor, one of the few women at the time. “When I told her what I wanted to do [go to medical school]”, Julie tells me, “It was evident, and I just didn’t realize it at the time, that she wanted to keep people—maybe just women--in the pure sciences. And she said, ‘Well, you don’t have a 4.0 GPA. I just don’t think you’re going to get in’. She was very negative. It just totally freaked me out. And I mean, maybe there was something to it, but I think my grade point average was actually pretty good and I think I would have done pretty well in the interviews-- who knows? But she made me think, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go in that direction’. I think that was a very pivotal moment and if I had gotten different advice maybe I would have gone down a different path. You never know where taking a slightly different path might lead you and what new opportunities might open up. What I’ve learned is that with a scientific background as a foundation, there are many interesting and rewarding directions you can choose to pursue.”

What I've learned is that with a scientific background as a foundation, there are many interesting and rewarding directions you can choose to pursue."

As she finished college, she decided to stay in the sciences and interviewed for both laboratory and non-laboratory roles where she could apply her scientific background. She interviewed for a few positions, including a company that tested the strength of glue. “I was living in Ohio, and I interviewed with 3 of the 5 major tire manufacturers, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a rubber compounder’. And then the glue job – you would be in all of those fumes all day. They took me into the lab, and it was just testing the strength of the glue. ‘No way.’” She ended up picking the job that she thought would give her the most adventure: a sales job with American Hospital Supply Corporation within their clinical diagnostics division called Dade Diagnostics in Miami, Florida.

Megan very enthusiastically asks her mom to tell the story about “the move to Arizona, the company car and the new boss”, which seems to be a family legend. Julie agrees, and begins the story: “Most sales managers want to hire someone who has been in sales, knows how to manage their territory, knows their products, and knows their customer base, so they can leverage that knowledge and immediately start booking sales. So the last person on their list is someone who is just out of school, has no sales experience, only has a rudimentary knowledge of the product, and has no contacts. And that was me! When I talked to my manager on the phone I could tell he was less than thrilled at having me move into what was a really good technical sales territory… As we talked through some job logistics, I said, well where do I pick up my [company] car? [Long pause on the phone] ‘Well, it’s in San Francisco’. [As an aside, Julie tells us she got the job and because it was going to start in May, they moved their wedding up from July to April.] So I arrived on the job married, which is none of their business, right? But my new husband needs a car to look for his new job—so I push for resolution to the car issue. I come up with the creative solution of us flying to San Francisco (never been there—check that city off my list!) and drive all the way down the coast (never done that—check!) and meet my boss in his San Diego office on Monday morning for orientation. My boss agreed but I think in his mind he might have thought—this is one potential way to get out of this situation…she’ll never make it here! I know he was surprised when I arrived on time, and looking professional, and he’s like [head shaking in disbelief], ‘I never thought you would make it’. He just thought I would get diverted and something would happen and I wouldn’t make it to his office. Anyway. So that was the story. First big job and my boss didn’t like me.”

Her boss seemed to enjoy giving her a hard time. Not too long after her arrival, Julie’s company released a new hematology product. Being the go-getter that she is (gee, I wonder where Megan gets it from?), Julie began ordering free samples and “gave them to all my customers”. She describes what happened next: “I get to my first official sales meeting for the whole region and am trying to make a good impression. The first thing that happens to me is that we go out for a coffee break; great weather, nice view from the hotel patio, I’ve made it to the big leagues—living like an adult –when I get brought back to reality when a bird poops on me. So I’m getting this bird stuff out of my hair --so much for looking the part. Later that same day, we are going over the sales results and we get to the new products. My boss starts out, ‘Well, someone used up the entire sample budget for the whole region in their territory.’ It was me. I had sampled 20 customers [which means sending them a sample]. I thought I was doing my job, selling the new product. I find out later that most seasoned sales reps won’t sell a new product because usually they don’t have all the kinks worked out yet and may do more harm than good with customers. So I’m mortified, and my boss is just shaming me in this big meeting. He knew it was me but he draws out the discussion prolonging my agony....my heart is racing, going ‘Oh my god, I used the whole budget.’ And then he declares, ‘And she closed orders on 17 of the 20 samples, top of the region!’ So it turned out that he wasn’t a jerk he just liked to torture me. His twisted way of commending me on my success.”

Julie’s draw to new products would be a foreshadowing for the rest of her career. Over the years, she has most enjoyed working on changing the organizations she’s worked for, either through developing new products or developing teams to gain additional skills. We ask her what her favorite project she’s ever worked on has been. She describes the opportunity she had as Vice President for Global Sales at Millipore to evolve her sales team to sell a more technical product globally. Millipore had previously sold generic filtration products, but they wanted to branch out into filtration products for specific applications in proteomics and genomics. “I had the opportunity to evolve the team to be able to sell a more technical product. Each one of those segments had its own vocabulary. If you’re talking to a PhD molecular biologist or someone conducting drug discovery testing for a pharma company, they want to know that you know what you’re talking about. And if your sales people go in and they have no clue and can’t use the right vocabulary, you’re not going to have any credibility. We were selling to pharmaceutical companies and research institutions during the human genome race, so we were trying to get as many products into market as possible.”

She tells us about specific products she marketed that were 96 and 384-well plates that could perform DNA purification and PCR clean up; the step just prior to DNA sequencing. As her company was launching these new products, Julie’s sales team faced a road block when customers told them they hadn’t yet finalized their decision on a liquid handling automation system, delaying their decision on her products. Not wanting this to be a roadblock, Julie went out and negotiated relationships with some of the biggest automation companies so that Millipore’s assays were preprogrammed into their automation platforms. It wasn’t all straight forward, though. “There was a lot of pressure from these automation companies saying, ‘I want to be your global supplier’ but they weren’t very strong in Europe or they weren’t strong in Japan.

So instead, I split the relationships by the system throughput (number of samples it could process). One company was the very high throughput partner and then there were others at mid and low throughput. The result was you didn’t have them competing against each other and you could do presentations and co-marketing with them without restricting yourself to just one partner. You could attract customers to different throughput levels.” The solution worked – the plates made it to market in a big way, and helped in the sequencing of many different genomes.

“I was so excited one time when I went to Japan to see a number of customers. I walked in and all you could see were Beckman liquid handling robotics systems filling the entire room—so many you could hardly get through between the systems. And every single one of them was running our plates – they were working on the rice and eel genome– along with the human genome. You could hear the robotics arms moving and the ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’, clunk’ of the plates come off at the end after they had finished doing their job on the DNA clean up. – ‘This is one of the happiest days in a Sales Manager’s life’. There were so many systems running our plates and I could hear them going into the trash can, which meant they were going to need to order more plates.

“But as you can imagine, all good things come to an end. After the human genome was sequenced, the funding declined. There still, to this day, are a lot of genomes being sequenced, but you don’t hear about it as much. So then we started losing business because people weren’t getting funded and had finished their projects. But it was an interesting project at the time.” Megan says she’s jealous that she was able to be involved in the genome project, and Julie agrees it was pretty awesome.

Julie is such a confident, successful woman and so I wondered if there was ever a time she didn’t feel up to a task she had to complete, and what she did. She tells us about her job at the second company she worked for, a successful Midwest laboratory equipment company. “I was promoted from sales into the headquarters and was only there a couple of weeks when a huge change occurred. I felt like the job was a bait and switch. When I got there, [we had sold our house in OH, my husband had left his job and we bought a house in Kansas City], the president of the company announced, ‘I’m going to make personnel changes. I’m going to have you focus on new products and have the guy who was doing new products lead sales. And I’m moving the head of sales (my old boss), to marketing communications, which is what I came in to do! I was just like, ‘This is a rip off. I just got here and this is a big switch in responsibilities.’ I was totally shocked. Little did I know at the time that it was the best career change that could have happened to me. It was a much better use of my scientific knowledge and actually became the next turning point in my career.

Little did I know at the time that it was the best career change that could have happened to me."

“I went from being a sales rep and thinking I was coming in to produce marketing tools and materials, which I thought I’d be good at because I could translate scientific and engineering aspects about the product into benefits that everyone understands. And then all of a sudden I was doing market research and business justification, and working with the R&D team, looking at companies to acquire and eventually I was running the strategic planning for the whole company.” She hadn’t started her MBA, so there was a lot of business acumen she learned as she went along. “I started from scratch basically”, she says. “I started doing my homework and tried to figure out what was a good business justification, what was good market research, and how do I go about doing it.”

“In those days, we didn’t have Survey Monkey. You do a written survey and you buy a mailing list and you have it snail mailed out, and then surveys come back and you tally everything by hand. A totally different world than today. I find the new products development process including market research fascinating. I have a whole system now for how I go about researching and defining a new product. I’m pretty happy that the process has resulted in many beneficial new products that provided productivity, protection and publishable results for scientists.”

She ultimately ended up working for the CEO. “He was very demanding. He always found the question that you didn’t know the answer to. He was very good at encouraging you, but equally as good at putting you in your place. You always wanted to have all the answers and be very well prepared. I think that taught me to over-prepare but it served me well in a lot of respects. Maybe I over prepare, though, because in the back of my head I’m always like, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to get that question I can’t answer’.” It was during this time she decided to get her MBA. “I always felt like – ok, I have a science degree and I think I’m doing the right thing, but I decided to go back and get my MBA to get that formal schooling. I did it at night and on the weekends. It took me about 3 years to finish it.”

In the 5 years following getting her MBA, she had all three of her children. Apparently she did not experience the pregnancy brain (being very forgetful and absent-minded), because she was super productive while pregnant. “I would be so tired when I would come home, but then I would go to bed early and wake up in the middle of the night. And again, personal computers were just beginning to be used—not in marketing but mainly in the finance groups at the time. So I would handwrite everything and give it to a secretary. I was getting another 3 or 4 hours in [of work] in the middle of the night. In the morning, I would come in and hand over this pile of stuff I had worked on overnight. So every two years, I would go into this very productive mode.” Hmmm…. I wonder if the pregnancy bump in productivity would help me out in graduate school?

Now all three of her children are in college or graduate school, and one of her daughters is getting married next year! Somehow, amidst being an awesome career woman and raising (along with her husband Dave) three pretty sweet kids, Julie also had time for another important role – The Costume Lady. Both Megan and her mom were figure skaters, and Julie was very involved in Megan’s skating club. As the Costume Lady, Julie designed and sewed over 25 costumes every year for the Theater on Ice Team. Megan says the costumes were amazing, and I believe it.

As we finish our coffee after dinner, Julie takes a look at her watch and realizes she has to run to catch her plane to Boston. There are so many more questions we want to ask her – I want to know about how she and her husband decided that her husband would stay at home with the kids. I want to know about how to ace a job interview. I also wouldn’t mind hearing about some of the tricks to sewing a fabulous skating costume. I guess it takes a lot longer than an hour and a half to learn all the life lessons from some one as awesome as Julie.

Maria Norton by Megan Sperry

It was 1974, the middle of the Cold War, and at UC Davis there was a large division devoted to studying the effects of radiation exposure. This was Maria’s first brush with science. Starting out as a data clerk and working her way up to Records Storage Facilities Manager when she was eighteen, Maria tells us about her experience setting up a new catalog system for scientists and pathologists who were looking for various specimens. She jokingly says, “I lived amongst all these dead parts. I reeked of formaldehyde.” Before the days of personal computers, “I would bring in great big print outs of results…into this conference room. And there were white lab-coated PhD, MD, or DVMs that were doing the research and I thought of them as just the ultimate smart people…but through the door walks this guy with a briefcase named Leon Rosenblatt. And he was a statistician.” She describes how the scientists relied on him so heavily in order to interpret the data correctly. “He’s the one to help us understand what these data mean. And he charged something like $50 an hour, which in today’s money is like $500 an hour. And I thought, that’s what I wanna be. I wanna be that guy. I wanted to have that kind of exciting career of helping people understand.” After completing her Masters in Statistics, Maria became a statistical consultant at Utah State University. She described to us how the job was immensely rewarding, but also taught her new things and left her wanting more. “I was able to help faculty as well as students. What I realized I was doing was helping other people unlock the information that was there. But, it was their projects and I was never directing or deciding what should be studied. I was assisting other people.” Maria got a taste of what it would be like to be a principal investigator while working as the project manager of the Cache County Study of Memory in Aging, a twenty-year longitudinal study that examined the risk factors for developing dementia. “I got more and more excited at the prospect of deciding the questions that should be addressed. There’s a big difference between working for somebody else, who has the great ideas for scientific pursuits, and you are assisting them because you have highly valued technical skills that they need, versus you’ve read enough of the literature, you’re enough in the know…to realize that there’s a variety of unanswered questions and my employer isn’t asking all the ones that I would want to ask.”

And I thought, that’s what I wanna be. I wanna be that guy. I wanted to have that kind of exciting career of helping people understand.”

So, in 1998, seven years after her husband died, Maria made a bold move. As a single mother of three, she went back to school to do her PhD in psychology. She tells us that the pursuit would not have been possible without the help of neighbors and friends. “It does take a village, and I definitely had a very supportive community.” Yet, Maria also explains that even while pursuing her own career goals, the most important aspect of her life was always her children. “I felt like, of course I need to expand my own mind and my own career potential, but I don’t want to turn around 5 or 10 or 20 years later and say, ‘Oops, I really blew it. My children are grown and I missed out on really enjoying being with them.’” Today, Maria is a Professor in the Department of Family Consumer and Human Development, focusing on the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Most recently, she has become interested in the development of interventional programs and studying the effects across ethnic and geographical populations. She tells us that Alzheimer’s is such an important area of research because it is quite literally a health crisis as the baby boomers reach old age. “We are trying to begin a grassroots movement, an AD preventive intervention with solid science behind it, with randomized controlled trials, that can establish a way to educate the general population about Alzheimer’s Disease because it’s what they call the ‘Silver Tsunami’ [that is] coming. We have 5 million cases in the US today and that’s already over $200 billion that is going towards their care. That’s expected to triple over the next few decades to 15 million people [and $1.2 trillion/year for their care] and that’s just one form of dementia. We can’t really afford to sit around and hope that a cure comes.” In addition, Maria explains that although there is a genetic component to Alzheimer’s, genetic research to date has found that genes appear to only account for roughly one-third of a person’s risk. The other two-thirds of risk then, is likely due to the environment. This includes healthy food choices, physical activity, stress management, sleep quality, social engagement, and cognitively stimulating your brain. The “six domains” as Maria describes it. She is currently working on an interventional project to help middle-aged people reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by developing a healthier lifestyle. “For middle-aged people, it’s more salient to them…they begin to think ‘Okay how many years do we have left and what’s the quality of that life going to be?’ A lot of them have seen their own parents develop dementia or they themselves are even the caregivers. So it’s very salient for them. It’s something they’re very worried about getting themselves. Most people though don’t realize, that a lot of it is within their own power. Of course, we cannot deliver a guarantee that a person will not get Alzheimer’s. What we are saying is this: if, for example, your risk level is 70% because your parents had AD, what we can offer you is a new kind of lifestyle pattern, things that you can change about your life if you really get serious about it and then make those changes and sustain them. You may end up lowering your risk substantially, not to zero, but much lower, and if that was me, I’d take that!” Maria acknowledges that pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories must keep working towards drugs to combat Alzheimer’s disease, but for some cohorts, there will always be side effects or contraindications.

The intervention that Maria and her team are rolling out in this first pilot study of 146 people includes health education and experiences along the “six domains”. This includes free events in the community that give study participants experiences that they can take home and bring into their own life. This includes free gym memberships, cooking lessons, and stress reduction workshops. Maria says that so far they have held 35 “Booster Events” for the community. “Although each behavioral domain is backed by good science, there may not be literature to support each individual activity that we create for them, but they’re provided more just to give participants some examples, to build their confidence so that they feel empowered to actually see a new vision of how they can change their lives.” Thus far, they have had a cooking competition called the Funger Games, a seminar on designing a brain-healthy home taught by an interior designer, and a session on mindfulness, led by someone who had studied with Tibetan monks and played the Tibetan singing bowl. By having these events Maria is telling the study participants, “…here are some examples, now go out there and grab what will really fit in your lifestyle.” Thus far, the study has collected twelve weeks of data via an app created by their collaborators in Ireland. The app asks the participants quick questions about their daily activities. Maria wants to know, “will offering all of these events and technology inspire people to become more active on their own, both physically and cognitively?” For now, she is trying to learn as much as she possibly can from this pilot study, before moving into larger trials in different populations. “To create a beneficial intervention, you , you have to get your feet wet and gain a lot of field experience. It’s the logistics and everything that goes into doing a study like this that must be demonstrated. .” In the next stages, she has hopes of expanding the study to North Carolina, a region that is geographically and ethnically different from Utah, with the help of collaborators located there. “If it’s not culturally sensitive and it isn’t going to fit within the lifestyles of another group, it’s just not going to work.” Maria is excited about this study and plans on spending her remaining years as a professor working on it. “It’s exciting to be able to do something. I thought, alright, I have another ten years of my career. I could use the twenty years of data I already have and publish all kinds of additional papers and I would be sitting at a computer analyzing data and writing up manuscripts. And those would be important papers, but I just really wanted to do something with maybe a little bit more of an immediate effect. Unless we get out there and create interventions that change peoples’ lives, we’re still going to be faced with this problem.” And, she jokes, “I fully intend to get Brad and Angelina to promote it as soon as we have it fully tested out.”

Yet, even with all this success and enthusiasm about her work as both a statistician and a researcher, when we ask what she considers to be her greatest success, she says it is her daughters. “My biggest success is that I have three caring, intelligent daughters—and don’t be so embarrassed, Heidi, because it’s really true! All three are entirely different in personalities and in professional interests, but they’re very well adjusted and caring people. It’s not about, ‘I’m going to get as much as I can for myself.’ I think all three of them really have hearts of gold.” She says that being a mother is, “…the most fun part of my life. And the part that was probably the most important and the most important in terms of the impact I would have on the world, because look at this smarty pants here [pointing to Heidi, her daughter].” We all crack up at this one. Alright, I’ve probably embarrassed Heidi enough by including these quotes. But I included them because they really speak to the type of person Maria is and the family she has raised. “I wanted the girls to be able to see that when Mommy got up and got ready to go off to work, it wasn’t a drudgery, where a person, acts like, thinks like, and seems like a victim. And yes it’s true, they had to grow up without a dad, but the balance scale to me was that they always had a lot more going for them, a lot more blessings, a lot more joy than the hardship. I wanted them to see that a woman could wake up and be THRILLED to being going to work. And love what she’s doing at work and the contribution she’s making even though she loves her children. And that didn’t seem to be an incongruous kind of message.”

I wanted them to see that a woman could wake up and be THRILLED to being going to work. And love what she’s doing at work and the contribution she’s making even though she loves her children. And that didn’t seem to be an incongruous kind of message.”

In addition to her outlook on balancing work and children, Maria also told us about what she has learned as she matured as a scientist. She tells us that her greatest mistake was, “…thinking I understood more than I really did [during her early years as a statistical consultant]. Having pride get in the way of getting the extra professional consultation that would have been beneficial. You want to appear really professional and knowledgeable. My gosh, you have a graduate degree in statistics; you ought to know everything about statistics. Well clearly you don’t, because you get two years’ worth of courses and there is a whole bunch more!” This really spoke to me, because sometimes it is incredibly difficult to say, “I don’t know,” and much easier to give an answer you are not sure about simply to avoid embarrassment. She tells us that, “It’s a really smart person who says, ‘I don’t know. Now let me go put in the legwork to find the answer.’” It is also likely related to age. “Maybe the older you get, the more mature you get and the more self-assured you are because of your accomplishments. The more you can say, ‘my ego can easily go on the shelf,’ because the ego is healthy enough as it is. When you’re earlier in your career you’re more scared about how you appear.” As we are winding down the interview, we want to know what Maria is up to besides being an amazing researcher and spending time with her family. Recently, she has joined an African drumming group at Utah State. Inspired by Heidi, who played in an African drumming group while at Stanford, she tells us, “That, that is really fun…so I just bought a drum and showed up at the one place [nearby] where an African drum circle practiced. I showed up knowing nothing and they were really cool and helped me. I’m a middle-aged lady and these guys are 25 or 30 with dreadlocks down to there and very hip and I’m just sitting there in my little college professor-ness.” She finds it to be so enjoyable. “It’s really, really fun to create these rhythms.” Finally, we want to know when she plans to retire. With the Alzheimer’s interventional study just getting underway, we question whether she will be able to truly walk away from this project in a mere 5 or 10 years. She tells us she simply doesn’t know, but that it’s hard to put it on the shelf if you have, “fire in the belly…If you care about the individual person and not just the numbers game and find a way to awaken their awareness, and to empower them, that they may literally reroute the course of where their brain is headed. And that’s pretty rewarding.”

We would like to thank the Sperry and Norton families for all the photos.